This week I was with a customer, assisting them with moving the office to another location. As the whole “migration” was done in a hurry, some things were not prepared on time – there was no Internet access on the second location. This was quite a problem, because people had to work during the move (they had to generate and send reports, invoices, respond to e-mails, etc.).

However, the good thing was that the networking was already done and servers were moved relatively fast. So… we had servers and networking up and running in no time, and we got even some “spare parts” – couple of MikroTik routers.

As I’ve said already – without Internet, people couldn’t do much, so I’ve had an idea to use someone’s phone and one of the “spare” routers to provide temporary Internet access for the whole network. I’ve connected one router to a network switch, grabbed someone’s iPhone, enabled Internet sharing on it, and then connected my notebook to the wired network, so that I could configure the router.

As you can see on the previous picture, I’ve set my SSID and password to “blog.kaniski.eu”, and I’ll use this later in my router configuration.

Note: I don’t have an iPhone near me right now, so I’m using my Lumia 930 and MikroTik RB751U-2HnD router to “emulate” this scenario... sorry about that.

Router’s configuration that was used is actually very simple – here’s the whole script (note that I’ve changed the ranges, names, etc. for privacy reasons):

You can check if your router (and the rest of your network) is connected to phone’s wireless (and Internet), by opening the router’s admin page in your favorite web browser (http://10.10.10.254/ in our case):

Although things didn’t go exactly like planned, this little trick enabled people to work while waiting for the “real Internet access”. Right now is three days from implementing this temporary solution and still no “real Internet” in sight… maybe next week.